Follow the Leader Over the Cliff
by lovablegeek
Summary: PostS1 - With Jack gone, the team can't even really figure out who's in charge, much less anything else, and a trip to the Himalayas turns into more or less the end of the world. - One shot


Jack would know what to do.

None of them ever said it, but it was the unspoken constant running through all their minds since this whole mess started. As it was, none of them were even entirely sure who was in charge now.

The three of them watched silently as Gwen paced back and forth in one of the few relatively small parts of the Hub that actually allowed for straight back-and-forth pacing.

"Well, we have to do _something_!"

Owen made a point of looking away, studying the ceiling like he'd never seen it before. Ianto, who had only been looking at her out of the corner of his eye anyway, ducked his head, avoiding eye contact. Tosh sighed as she realized she was going to have to say something. She glanced to the readings on her computer once more. Not like she hadn't been staring at them for the past couple hours, but she kept hoping something new would jump out at her. Something that would make it clear what they ought to do.

"I don't... Maybe?"

Gwen turned to face Tosh directly, her eyes lighting a little as she realized someone might actually be listening to her. "We don't have a choice, do we? What if it's something dangerous? Do you really think they have the resources to deal with a crash-landed alien in Tibet?"

"Who cares?" Owen asked, his eyes still on the ceiling. "It's Tibet."

Without looking up, Ianto muttered softly, "Yes, why don't we let the alien menace get a foothold in Tibet so it can take over the rest of the world."

Owen shoved himself out of his chair immediately, starting to stalk towards Ianto. "What, are you going to shoot me again because I think it's stupid?"

Gwen stepped neatly between Owen and Ianto, one hand to Owen's chest to stop him. "No one is shooting anyone." Her tone had the implied addition of 'or else'. "And what, aliens can land anywhere outside of Britain and we don't care, have at it?"

"Well... yeah. It's not our job! Anyway, we don't even know if there _is_ an alien. It could just be space junk, and we can't just go running off on field trips halfway around the world whenever we feel like it."

"Did you even look at the data or are you just saying that so you won't have to go out of your way?"

"When did Jack leave _you_ in charge?"

"You know what, you don't get to talk. You're still on probation."

"You can't _put_ me on probation!"

Tosh rested her elbows on her desk, head in her hands, and tried to fight off the inevitable headache as Gwen and Owen went on, now yelling and talking _over_ each other so neither's words were really comprehensible. Jack would know what to do. Jack would shut them up, set everything right.

Jack was gone.

She didn't look up or move as Ianto walked over and rested a hand lightly on the back of her neck, cool and comforting - relatively speaking, at least, as comforting as anything could get when everything was going wrong. "Anything I can do?"

"Not unless you're willing to kill both of them for me," she sighed, closing her eyes. "And then we'd have to run the Hub ourselves."

"It would be hard to explain to Jack once he gets back, too."

Tosh nodded wearily, trying to focus on the feeling of Ianto's hand on the back of her neck rather than the pang in her chest at the mention of Jack. But he would come back. He had to.

She lifted her head at last and glanced back over to Gwen and Owen - still arguing, of course. She caught a few words ("So you just want to leave the rift completely unguarded?" "The worst's already come out of it, thanks to you, and Jack wouldn't have left if it weren't safe...") before turning in her chair to look up at Ianto.

"What are we supposed to do?"

"Well, as long as they're fighting, we could find a mud pit and throw them in. It should be interesting to watch."

Tosh narrowed her eyes, attempting to glare. She had the feeling it wasn't working very well. "You're not helping."

"I'm sorry," he said with a faint smile. "I meant to take your mind off wanting to kill the two of them."

Sighing, she turned her chair back to face her computer. "I think maybe you should find another way to help."

An unidentified spaceship crash landed in the Himalayas. The fact that Torchwood might well be the only ones who knew about it - certainly it would have been on the news _somewhere_ if someone had noticed, right? And the fact that apparently none of them agreed about how to handle it. Not a confluence of facts that Tosh was particularly fond of, but maybe if she just kept... staring at it something would happen.

Not bloody likely.

She made a point of paying absolutely no attention to Gwen and Owen's argument - it showed no sign of stopping any time soon, no sign that they might come to some sort of rational consensus, and Tosh was fairly sure they'd just dropped actual _arguments_ altogether and gone on to petty bickering. What did catch her attention, really, was Ianto speaking. He wasn't nearly as loud as Gwen or Owen, but in the middle of that, he didn't need to be. A calm voice rather stood out.

"Why don't you two stop fighting and let Tosh decide?"

Gwen and Owen both stopped - surprisingly enough, Tosh thought - and turned to look at her. Tosh, momentarily unable to find the words to respond to that, remained silent as Ianto went on, "She does have seniority."

Owen opened his mouth, and Ianto added, before he could actually _say_ anything, "Do you think anyone's going to listen to you after the rift, Owen?"

Owen closed his mouth with a glare.

Tosh, still stunned that Ianto had even _made_ the suggestion, much less that they were actually _taking_ it, turned once more to look at Ianto. "_You_," she repeated in a fierce whisper, "are _not helping_."

* * *

Tosh tried not to fidget on the planes, tried not to overstress when there was nothing she could do to fix it, and tried to convince herself she hadn't made a mistake in deciding they should all take this trip. Alright, to be truthful it had been mostly Gwen continuing to insist it was the best option, and Tosh finally had to agree with her, because... well, it _sounded_ right, and what else were they supposed to do? Still, she'd been the one to decide, when it came down to it. She could have said no.

She didn't sleep, the whole time. Not that almost two days without sleep would do her any good, but too many what ifs kept running through her mind. What if the rift did something, just when there was nothing to watch them? What if Jack came back and they were all gone? What if one of them got hurt out in the mountains, that far from help?

Sleep, with those thoughts on her mind, was out of the question.

Ianto didn't sleep either, unless some of that time he spent with his eyes closed and head pressed against the window he dozed off without Tosh noticing. For the most part, he just stared out the window, at the clouds or the ground far below. Owen did sleep most of the time, but with the uncomfortable way he kept shifting around in his chair, Tosh didn't think he was all that deeply asleep, even if he never opened his eyes whenever he leaned his head against Gwen's shoulder and she shoved him gently off. Gwen sat there staring at a book full of crossword puzzles, though she spent more time tapping her pen against the paper than she did actually writing anything down, as far as Tosh could tell. Every now and then she'd look up and Gwen would be watching _her_, looking worried, and looked away the instant Tosh met her eyes.

It didn't inspire a great deal of confidence in the situation, and _all_ of them seemed to be making a conscious effort to talk as little as possible. If none of them spoke, none of them could mention how big a mistake this could turn out to be.

Of course, no one really _had_ to mention it when they finally got off the plane at the tiny airport in Lhasa and there on the small television set turned to a news station, pictures of all four of them flashed across the screen.

"_Terrorists_?" Owen demanded. "They're calling us terrorists?"

Tosh frowned at the screen - all the audio was Chinese, but someone had turned on English subtitles, not that she needed the subtitles just to catch the _name_... "By order of Harold Saxon," she murmured, heart in her throat.

"_Harold Saxon_ thinks we're terrorists?"

Gwen shook her head slowly. "That doesn't make any sense."

Ianto wasn't even looking at the screen, and barely glanced at the others - he kept scanning the area around them like he expected someone to jump out at them. "It could be that we opened the rift and let loose something that killed half of Cardiff."

"We _all_ did that!" Owen growled defensively, despite the fact that Ianto hadn't even mentioned his name.

"Blame me for offering a suggestion..."

Tosh bit her lip. "Can we stop arguing and _leave_ instead of drawing attention to ourselves?"

"Right," Gwen said with a firm nod, "we should go before anyone notices us."

Too late. A couple of security guards seemed to be watching them, glancing from the group of them to the television and back, wearing expressions you never wanted to see on the faces of men carrying guns. Tosh held her breath, hoping they would let it go, please, if they'd just let them alone...

The guards started toward them. Gwen turned around to face the others and said shortly, "Run."

Ianto grabbed Tosh's wrist and ran, Gwen right on their heels. Glancing back, Tosh saw Owen standing stock still with a silver orb in one hand. The guards raised their guns, shouting in Chinese, and Tosh skidded to a halt, inadvertently dragging Ianto with her while Gwen nearly ran into both of them. "Owen!"

Owen pressed a button on the sphere, and let go of it - it remained floating in the air, at about eye level. Tosh could _swear_ she recognized the orb, but it was one of those things they kept all over the Hub and didn't pay much attention to because it just wasn't that important... Suddenly, it seemed very important - if she could just remember what it _did_.

As he dropped to the floor, Owen seemed to realize that the three of them were still standing there, and gave them the look Tosh recognized as translating roughly to 'you are deeply stupid, aren't you?' "What're you doing just standing there? You were supposed to be _running_."

The sphere started to glow an ominous blue color. Gwen grabbed Tosh and Ianto each by the wrist and dragged them down to the floor, just as the orb flashed bright, blinding blue, the light shooting out in a flat, level plane in all directions around the orb. Tosh squeaked, somewhat embarrassingly, and ducked her head. Someone's arm settled protectively over her shoulders, shielding her - with Gwen still holding her wrist, she recognized it immediately, unthinkingly, as Ianto. There were a few heavy thumps, a metallic clatter, then silence.

Tosh lifted her head to see the security guards - as well as everyone else in the immediate vicinity - on the floor, unconscious. Or at least, she hoped unconscious...

Owen got to his feet first, grabbing the orb off the floor. Ianto and Gwen stood, and Tosh grabbed her laptop case as she pushed herself up, hoping it hadn't been damaged when they all hit the ground.

"You see?" Owen said as they started for the nearest exit, eager to be far away from here before everyone woke up. "_Now_ we're terrorists."

* * *

This was her fault. None of them ever _said_ it - except Owen, that once, and after Gwen punched him he didn't mention it again. Tosh didn't say it either, knowing that if she did, the others would point out that they all made mistakes - Ianto's cybergirlfriend, the number of times Gwen had screwed up since she joined the team, and if Owen didn't, _one_ of them would point out that Owen had been the first to open the rift and almost end the world.

That didn't change the fact that this was _her_ mistake. That they'd all looked to her to decide, simply because no one was going to shout at her when she made a decision, and she'd decided, sure, why not, let's go to the Himalayas, what could it hurt?

She was the reason the four of them were huddled in some tiny, abandoned shack that smelled like goat in the middle of nowhere, hiding out from two governments who thought they were terrorists (and now, thanks to Owen, had a _reason_ to think that), with no reception on their phones and no contact with the outside world. And on top of it all, no sign of the supposed alien they'd come to find, no wreck, _nothing_, like it never existed in the first place.

This wouldn't have happened if Jack were still around, and Tosh wasn't sure if she blamed herself more, or him for leaving in the first place. Sure, even when Jack was around they got kidnapped by cannibals, but that turned out alright. She didn't have the feeling that it would, this time.

It didn't help that she hadn't slept, _really_ slept, in over a week. It was just hard to sleep when it was freezing, they were on the run, and Tosh had to keep convincing herself that sound outside was _not_ a yeti, honestly. She settled for just leaning against Ianto as they sat on the unfinished floor of the shack, her head pillowed against his shoulder, half-dozing, though not very deeply.

The thing that woke her was... something beeping. Tosh's eyes snapped open as she sat bolt upright. It wouldn't have been so surprising, except they didn't have anything _to_ beep, with their electronics useless out here.

Gwen and Owen sat up too, their heads emerging from the cocoon they'd made of their coats (just to keep warm, Gwen had insisted). "'s it a bomb?" Owen asked blearily.

"Yes, it's a cunning trap left for us by goats," Ianto answered, shifting to pull his phone out of his pocket. "It's..."

He stopped in surprise, eyebrows raised as he flipped open the phone and stared at the screen.

"It's a voicemail. From Jack."

Gwen immediately pulled away from Owen and hurried to Ianto's side to look. "That's not possible, even the Archangel Network doesn't work out here!"

"Apparently it does." He pressed a series of number sand held the phone to his ear, expressionless. As he did, the rest of their phones started beeping frantically too, with voicemails, missed calls, text messages...

Tosh scrambled for her phone and flipped it open to find a series of text messages.

_you guys need to run. don't trust saxon. just hide._

call me when you get this.

are you alright?

where ARE you guys!?

"Something's happened," Ianto said flatly, and that tone of voice from Ianto always made Tosh feel like the pit of her stomach had dropped out, and her heart seize up.

But underneath that, and far more frightening, she slowly realized what she'd been hearing for several minutes now, a low hum that sounded like a million voices blending together, voices with a mixture of childish excitement and the screech of hot metal to them.

"I think something's happening right now," she murmured as she got to her feet and walked to the door nof the shack. The second she stepped outside the hum of voices and clash of metal grew louder, drawing her attention to the sky.

And her breath froze in her throat as she stared at the jagged rent in the sky, and the thousands, millions of spheres that poured through, filling the clear blue sky between the mountains, from horizon to horizon.

She heard the others coming out behind her, but couldn't turn to face them, couldn't find anything to say, because all she could think was, irrationally, that even this wouldn't be happening if Jack were here.

"At least this time you can't say the end of the world's our fault," Owen said softly behind her. Tosh, unable to tear her eyes from the pink-orange-purple tear in the sky, unable to do anything else for fear of bursting into tears, started to laugh. 


End file.
